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Kittens ‘n Mittens

Our new children’s librarian started last week, and boy am I happy! I truly do love doing storytimes (it’s the theatrical ham in me), but with all of my other duties, they make my workload almost unbearable.

For my next-to-last final storytime for our youngest group, I put together a Kittens ‘n Mittens themed storytime (basically, I was looking for an excuse to sing Soft Kitty with the children). As the main story, we read Jerry Pinkney’s Three Little Kittens. Right after the story I pulled out my handy-dandy flannel board, the kittens, mamma cat, mittens, and pie that I made based on Stories with Ms. Jenna‘s flannel kitties. She had obviously used thread and needle for the details (something that I don’t have the materials or skills for), so I improvised. My greatest discovery was that I could cut a teensy-tiny piece of flannel and roll it into a ball for the kitten’s foot pads (I did a similar trick with the whiskers).

I am very aware that our youngest children aren’t very strong visually, but we’re a small library and can only handle a handful of children at our events – so everyone gets a front row seat. However, I’m still hoping to build a larger flannel board for future storytimes.

I also didn’t do a traditional story with the flannel board. Since we had just read the story, I had fun seeing what the children could remember from the story, or I did an extremely shortened version depending on the groups’ interest levels. The most popular part was when I let the kittens eat their pie and made silly nomming noises while holding the pie up to their mouths.

If you’d like any other information about what I did for this storytime, then don’t hesitate to ask! Everyone had a purrfectly fun time.